Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

From Goodreads.com:
"Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out-with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes-to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There's Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limps and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan...Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins...albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious-and dangerous-asset.
   As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same."

"There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores, in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity."

I discovered Geek Love while wandering the library, the word "geek" caught my eye immediately. I like geeks, little did I know that a geek is a member of a carnival who bites the heads off live chickens. I learned this a few pages in and the strangeness didn't stop there. As you read above the mom consumes amphetamines and arsenic while pregnant to try to create freaks to add to the carnival. They also have an exhibit of failed attempts.
The characters in this book are memorable; Chick's need to be loved, Arty's lust for power, Iphy and Elly just trying to exist, and Oly, always on the outside, watching. To the kids, their special skills, what made them "freaks," was their measure of good to the family.
I was, in turns, fascinated and repulsed by the world contained in Geek Love. I've never read another book that compares to what you encounter when you pick this up.